Scary Movie [VHS]

In Scary Movie we visit BA Corpse High School, where all the pupils are visibly in their late 20s and a masked madman (or two) is on the loose, slaughtering self-involved, pop-culture-obsessed kids while trying to get to virginal heroine Cindy Campbell (Anna Faris). The gang are still guilt-ridden over their semi-accidental killing of a fisherman last Halloween, while at least one has been driven homicidally mad by the cancellation of the Wayans Brothers television show. An old vaudeville motto has it that you can't kid a kidder, and the makers of this would have done well to remember MAD Magazine didn't run a satire of Airplane!. The obvious flaw in the canny plan to satirise Wes Craven's Scream films is that they were already comedies, playing as many self-referential tricks as anything from the Naked Gun team but with the added bonus of actual scary scenes. The joke about ageing starlets pretending to be high school kids was done in Scream 3, for instance, and Scary Movie keeps sending up scenes that were funnier "straight" and only really gets a good satirical victim when it turns to the somewhat sillier I Know What You Did Last Summer franchise. Director Keenen Ivory Wayans and his writing-acting brothers Marlon and Shawn show no real interest in the genre they're taking pot-shots at, suggesting that the point here was to lampoon something hot rather than (as in the best spoofs) growing from a mixture of affection and contempt. The only way Scary Movie can get a reaction is going for gross: heads skewered by dildos, slashed-out breast implants, tiny dick gags, a torrential gush of sperm washing the heroine against the ceiling, relentless fag jokes (a DVD-ROM "Gaydar" feature even enumerates these) and a lot of old Cheech and Chong marijuana routines. About one in 10 of the jokes crack a grudging smile, with riffs on recognisable bits from The Matrix and The Usual Suspects, and a nicely nasty irrelevant aside that makes fun of both Titanic and Amistad. The best moment is a "scenes we've always wanted to see" scene in which an obnoxious cinemagoer is murdered by an entire audience for talking on her mobile phone during Shakespeare in Love. On the DVD: the DVD is letterboxed to 2.35:1 and has Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtracks in English and Italian, with subtitles in English and Italian. Extras are seven brief scenes cut out of the film (none very funny), a matey behind-the-scenes featurette, DVD-ROM features (a useful function plays the film with all the jokes and in-references explained in subtitles) and the theatrical trailer. --Kim Newman